Storytellers Run the World: Welcome to the "Post-truth" Era

Jag Bhalla is an entrepreneur, inventor and writer. His current project is Errors We Live By, a series of short exoteric essays exposing errors in the big ideas running our lives, details at www.errorsweliveby.com. His last book was I'm Not Hanging Noodles On Your Ears, a surreptitious science gift book from National Geographic Books, details at www.hangingnoodles.com. That explains his twitter handle @hangingnoodles.

18 November, 2016

1. “Those who tell the stories run the world,” writes George Monbiot. What are these world-running stories?

7. There is truth in Hayek’s stories, but also in their counterstories: Competition can breed inefficiency. Businesses can contain “spectacular inefficiencies.” Sustainable competition can require regulation. Taxes can strengthen market infrastructure. Selfishness can hinder voluntary-market solutions. It’s an economic cartoon story that customers aren’t rational maximizers.

8. Plus crucially, “government will never run the way Silicon Valley runs,” Obama once told tech entrepreneurs.

9. CEOs opine to Obama about “how we do things,” but businesses (and their “disruptors”) often profit by cherry-picking the easy segments.Government must handle the messy and expensive cases that businesses can just exclude (like pre-existing conditions pre-Obamacare).

13. Trump brilliantly used social media to “hack” traditional media to amplify his stories (many trust information from friends and families more than from institutions—>Facebook’s “neutral” platform enabled Trumps win).

14. Tech titans typically dislike whatever can’t be done by algorithm. And ethics still needs humans (—>doesn’t scale—>lowers profitability). What happens to the ethics of what they’re disrupting?

15. Obama observes that today’s story ecosystem “means everything is true and nothing is true.” Calls for new information sources to provide “reason and facts… neither of which is partisan,” seem naive.

16. Modifying Monbiot, those who control those who make and distribute and tell the effective stories, run the world.

17. Want truer stories? Sarah Smarsh suggests putting your country ahead of your coffee—>pay for real journalism. “Without liberty, there is no true journalism.” Without true journalism there is no liberty.

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Illustration by Julia Suits, author of The Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions, and The New Yorker cartoonist.